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InDesign tutorials

Among Adobe’s tools, Photoshop and Illustrator get most of the glory, but the old desktop publishing warhorse that is InDesign remains key to a lot of design tasks. Here are four great InDesign tutorials that have surfaced in 2017 so far.

Laura Hawk explains how to create a book cover in this 11-step tutorial

Here, Laura Hawk explains 11 steps you need to follow to ensure a perfect book cover in Adobe InDesign. This comprehensive tutorial covers everything from setting up your template, setting up the bleed and arranging the cover panels to adding the barcode and flowing in the copy.

In this tutorial Jo Gulliver, senior art editor on our sister magazines, explains how to create ink swatches and groups in Adobe InDesign. This will enable you to create the maximum number of colours with a limited number of inks, without increasing the separations used for printing.

Want to design an impactful event poster in InDesign? Then follow this tutorial from Jo Gulliver, which walks you through the process of creating a typographical poster, showing you how to apply a document grid, and how to create and edit typography.

If you really want to transform your print project, you need to investigate special print finishes. In this guide, Jo Gulliver explains the processes she uses when creating artwork in InDesign for special finishes such as varnishes, foil blocking, embossing and die cutting.

Everyone knows about PDFs, but you may not be aware how far the format has advanced in recent years. It’s now possible to embed videos in PDFs, and this tutorial by Pariah Burke explains exactly how to go about it.

Tutorials for other software

Here are three other top tutorials that don’t involve Photoshop, Illustrator or InDesign but nonetheless offer a great grounding in their respective subjects. We hope you find them as rewarding as we did.

Subscription-free and with some powerful capabilities, Affinity Designer is an increasingly popular alternative to Adobe Illustrator. In this Affinity tutorial, Simon Middleweek explains how to use its gradients and layer effects to create an 80s-style logotype.

In this intermediate level tutorial, Yulia Sokolova explains the process of creating her first font, Bananito, from start to finish. This covers everything from drawing the initial design, transferring the drawing to the computer, and turning it into a font using software such as FontLab or Glyphs.

As a graphic designer, creating augmented reality (AR) experiences may be a little outside your technical competence. But you may well be asked to, for example, design a pitch video to show what an app with AR capabilities could look like. After Effects has some powerful tools to help you create these kinds of graphics, and in this tutorial, Laura Hawk explains how to use them.